A Powerful Influence on American Democracy
In May 1951, Kwame Nkrumah received an invitation to Lincoln University. The news that his alma mater had plans to confer upon him an honorary doctorate the very next month landed with total surprise. As Nkrumah wrote:
It was just over six years since I had left America and I could not believe that such an honour could be bestowed upon me in so short a space of time. I felt that I had not done enough to merit it and my first inclination was to decline it.
The Lincoln invitation had been the doing of Horace Mann Bond, the first Black man to lead the university and its president since 1949. Bond, a precocious African American student from Nashville, had graduated with honors from Lincoln in 1923 at nineteen and then earned advanced degrees from the University of Chicago. He had made his academic reputation with original research on the education of Blacks in the American South. In his first book, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, he questioned the use of IQ tests by the army to assess the intelligence of African American recruits.
This anticipated by decades a scholarly consensus that that would eventually find that standardized tests were anything but culturally neutral. Subsequent work by Bond reappraised the history of the American Reconstruction Era and refuted the idea long held dear to champions of the myth of the “Lost Cause” and of the so-called Redemption, the period of resumed white supremacy across the South that followed Reconstruction. It held that profligacy caused by the entry of Blacks into government after the Civil War had driven the South into economic ruin.
In addition to being an original thinker, influential scholar, and part of what was still a very small cohort of academically trained Black historians in the United States, Bond was also a classic “race man.” This once-common term was used for African Americans who wore pride in their identity openly and believed that their social duty was to do whatever they could to advance the prospects of Black Americans as a group. In many of the black and white photographs of Bond from this era, there’s a hint of a scowl, and in that expression, I have often been tempted to read not just the flinty combativeness he was known for, but also smoldering resentment over the wages that racism in his society exacted from him and from Black people in general.
Although descended from enslaved great-grandparents, Bond was born into the Black middle class as the son of two college-going parents, a mother who became a schoolteacher, and a father who was a Congregational minister who preached throughout the South. As a boy, he was regaled with memories of Africa by his aunt Mamie, who had worked as a medical missionary on the continent. Then, as a young man, he had avidly read stories about Africa in the pages of Du Bois’s NAACP journal, The Crisis, which often emphasized the existence of kingdoms and accounts of African achievement. Du Bois wrote much of this content himself, beginning with the story of his first voyage to the continent, in 1923, when he visited Liberia, one of only two Black-ruled countries in the world at the time (although Haiti was then under American military occupation). Du Bois often lapsed into what one historian has called “a hyper-lyricism brought on by the sheer euphoria of having slipped the surly bonds of American racism.” “Africa is vegetation. It is the riotous, unbridled bursting life of lead and limb,” Du Bois gushed in one typical column. It was also “sunlight in great gold globules,” and “soft, heavy-scented heat,” that produced a “divine, eternal languor.”
In 1949, Bond took the first of his own eventual ten trips to Africa, and it utterly reshaped his life. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it also powerfully altered the historical trajectory of Black people on both sides of the Atlantic for the next two decades. Bond’s interest in Nkrumah, and the bridge he helped build for him with African Americans, threw a precious lifeline to the emerging Gold Coast leader at a time when he had few other cards at his disposal. And it pointed to a possible future of deep and mutually strengthening ties between two parallel movements, one for civil rights in America, and the other for independence for Africa’s colonies. Both were in dire need of allies as the world entered the Cold War. Bond’s early trips to Africa placed him at the forefront of an ideologically diverse group of African American intellectuals and political activists that would swell dramatically throughout this period —all of them fired up with the idea that the liberation of Africa and the battle for full citizenship rights for Black Americans were so fundamentally linked that if they were to advance at all, they would have to proceed in tandem.
In its first phase, this group included African Americans who had become familiar to the broad public: the novelist Richard Wright, the diplomat Ralph Bunche, the nationally prominent labor leader and elder statesman, A. Philip Randolph, and, just slightly later, a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. Behind big names like these stood a panoply of others who also played crucial roles in building bonds between Black America and Africa but who mostly labored in relative anonymity. These included people such as William Alphaeus Hunton, a professor of English, and the historians Rayford Logan and William Leo Hansberry, all of whom taught at Howard University. The latter, uncle of the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, had begun teaching African history at Howard in 1922. Four years later, with the appointment of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Howard got its first Black president, but it wasn’t until two decades after that, in 1954, at Hansberry’s initiative, that the university introduced the nation’s first African Studies curriculum.
The Second World War and its aftermath saw a recentering of pan-Africanist energy in Africa itself.
After following the example of Lincoln’s leadership by educating more and more students from Africa and the Caribbean, Black colleges and universities in the United States became a catalyst for this, spurring the development of a global Black consciousness movement. Not only did thinkers from different continents come together on these campuses, but with a critical mass came much more militantism. Here, although Lincoln had been the undeniable pathbreaker, it was Howard University that, starting even before the Second World War had ended, surged ahead to become the most important locus of ideas and activism linking Blacks from Africa and the diaspora in profound new ways.
Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria has been called a “student zero” of African nationalism on American campuses for the way he had helped recruit African students, including Nkrumah, to historically Black colleges in the United States. Although Azikiwe eventually graduated from Lincoln, he had transferred there from Howard, where he had been unable to pay the bills for his studies. It was at Howard, he later wrote, where “the idea of a new Negro evolved into the crusade for a new Africa.” This resulted from the intense stimulation he experienced on a campus that had been assembling a deepening bench of intellectual stars since Alain Locke, a Rhodes Scholar, was hired in the 1920s. In Azikiwe’s case, it came from studying there under people like Leo Hansberry and Ralph Bunche.
At Howard, and wherever else a critical mass of students from Africa and the Black diaspora outside of the United States gathered, something else important began to occur: a sharing of experiences of exploitation and suffering under imperial rule. This also juiced campus progressivism. Learning from each other bred a bolder self-confidence, and as it did so, colonized and recently emancipated peoples began to lose whatever lingering patience they had with the temporizing of Western nations based on the supposed need for tutelage and gradual preparation for the responsibilities of self-government.
From the moment of his appointment as the first Black president of Lincoln University in 1945, Bond faced persistent pressure from trustees and others to change the school’s vocation. For decades, its official mission had been “the education of Colored youth.” Bond acceded to the removal of that phrase from Lincoln’s charter, but he pushed back against demands that the university actively recruit white students in order to significantly dilute its Black student body. These calls became even more insistent in the early 1950s when desegregation cases were working their way through the federal courts, making it seem increasingly likely that racial separation in American schools was doomed to fade.
True race man that he was, Bond was furious over the board’s pressure and responded defiantly. At most northern colleges and universities, Black students and faculty still numbered few to none. Lincoln, by contrast, had long welcomed white students and even recruited small numbers of them from nearby communities. “Having done this have we not done enough?” Bond asked. “Our self-respect will not permit us to do more.” In 1949, the Lincoln alumnus Thurgood Marshall, then legal counsel of the NAACP, gave a speech on campus in favor of integrating his alma mater. But Bond, who had personally led the desegregation of local schools in the community surrounding Lincoln by suing to force them to accept Black students, pushed back. According to a biographer, he criticized Marshall and the NAACP for praising white colleges that had two or three Black undergrads while maintaining all white boards and faculties. “Let those white colleges with token Black students hire Black faculty and choose Black board members; then they might merit being called interracial, as Lincoln did.”
Resentment over such double standards fueled Bond’s determination to intensify his school’s relations with Africa, both in terms of supporting applicants from the continent, as it had long done, and through a new kind of personal diplomacy toward Africa. Through Bond, the politics of these two issues — integration at home and the pull of Africa abroad — on the surface, seemingly unrelated, would become increasingly and explicitly joined. As they did so, they set him at odds with Lincoln’s board and ultimately contributed to his firing in 1957, ironically the year that Nkrumah led Ghana to independence.
Bond’s first visit to Africa in 1949 was on a trip partially paid for by a Lincoln alumnus from Nigeria. His first inkling of what Africa could mean for Lincoln and what Lincoln could mean for the continent had likely occurred two years earlier. That was when Nnamdi Azikiwe had returned to the campus to receive an honorary degree. Around that time, Bond began to argue that his university’s longstanding connections to the continent constituted a major competitive advantage that Lincoln had done little to exploit. Africa was clearly moving into a new age of eventual independence, and with alumni like Azikiwe and Nkrumah, the school had a special role to play. Bond even wrote that these two had “learned Democracy — with a capital D” at Lincoln, where they were made “good Americans — with an immense admiration for American inventiveness, enterprise and industry.”
By the time of his 1949 tour of West Africa, Bond’s thinking had evolved from vague and boosterish notions about the public relations gains to be won by Lincoln to a political vision about synergies to be developed between currents of Black nationalism on opposing sides of the Atlantic. Writing from Africa to the editor of the Baltimore Afro-American, then a leading Black newspaper, Bond affirmed: “Here is Black nationalism — the more astonishing to an American because of the low esteem in which the African American is held. But the American Negro enjoys that same tremendous prestige here that America does.” This was the germ of a robust and sophisticated later argument that the exercise of sovereignty and self-rule by new African leaders could serve as powerful sources of pride and inspiration for African Americans, while also helping to undermine the worst sorts of racist stereotypes held by whites against them.
“The key point for realizing the aspirations of the American Negro, lie[s] in Africa, and not in the United States,” Bond remarked in a “Letter from Africa” column dated October 17, 1949. “It is the African who, I think, will dissipate forever the theories of racial inferiority that now prejudice the position of the American Negro.” Of all the colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Gold Coast seemed closest to achieving independence from a European power peacefully. Bond became one the first African American thinkers to seize on its importance as a lodestar for African American liberation as well. If the Gold Coast, soon Ghana, could bring to vivid life images of Black people successfully conducting their affairs in a reasoned and orderly manner, he believed, it would deliver a serious blow to white supremacy everywhere.
The acerbic, chip-on-his shoulder Bond may have been among the first to think this way, but he was by no means alone. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about this forgotten epiphanic moment is how widespread such thinking became across the African American political spectrum. According to the standards of the early Cold War, Bond stripped of his pan-Africanism was a run-of-the-mill, pro-business, anticommunist figure. Thoughts like his about the importance of Ghana’s example to African Americans found their neat echo, though, in 1950 in the words of Alphaeus Hunton. This Harvard educated grandson of Virginia slaves, Howard University English professor, and Communist Party member, became a leader of a pioneering anti-imperialist group called the Council on African Affairs (CAA). The CAA’s members were fiercely hounded by the McCarthy-era’s hysterically anticommunist House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1951, Hunton was imprisoned for his refusal to testify before the committee. He emigrated to Africa in 1960, first to Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea, then to Nkrumah’s Ghana, and finally to Zambia, where he died of cancer in 1970. In one letter, he wrote:
It is not a matter of helping the African people achieve freedom simply out of a spirit of humanitarian concern for their welfare. It is a matter of helping the African people because in doing this we further the possibility of their being able to help us in our struggles here in the United States. Can you not envision what a powerful influence a free West Indies or a free West Africa would be upon American democracy?
Bond’s writings and conversations from this time reveal still more complexity about the ways in which racial identity questions for Black Americans were evolving in relation to a changing Africa. From that first trip to the continent, at a time when “Negro” or “colored” were the standard appellations for Blacks, Bond had already begun to anticipate the shift, still at least a quarter century away, toward the term African American. “Sincerely — (and with a great new pride that I am an American of African descent…)” he wrote at the close of one letter.
Excerpted from The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French. Copyright © 2025 by Howard W. French. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
